All Episodes
Previous Next
July 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
20:42
Phil Giraldi : Will Israel Destroy the US?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, July 9th, 2025.
My dear friend Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Phil, a pleasure.
As always, you have a fabulous piece that's either out or about to come out called America's Trillion Dollar, quote, Defense Closed, quote, budget.
And I'd like to explore some of your thoughts in there and connect them to events that are going on as we speak.
Do you think American leadership, American governmental, political, Defense Department leadership is paranoid about an invasion of the United States, notwithstanding the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, friendly neighbors to the north and friendly neighbors to the south?
Well, I think I would say 90% of that is pure fear-mongering because they want to keep their budgets high.
They want to keep their political power enhanced, and it's that sort of thing.
But I think there is a genuine fear of China, which I've been seeing that surface now since I've been kind of in the movement for the last 10 years.
Somehow, always China comes up.
China is a competitor.
China has not attacked us.
China is not planning to attack us.
But somehow this game keeps playing with China as the dangerous card.
I don't quite get it, but it's something I've noticed.
And apart from that, I think the fear-mongering is purely motivational in terms of keeping the budgets high, keeping the budgets going when even you haven't appropriated the money, which is most often the case.
It's ridiculous.
The argument about China is really, of course, an absurd one.
There's no basis for it at all.
But you have things like events like the Secretary of Defense figuratively shaking his fist at China as he stood in Taiwan, basically saying, come and get us because we're going to protect Taiwan.
I mean, this is childlike.
There is no evidentiary basis for it.
And of course, it would be preposterous for the United States.
Let's just say China did use the military to expel the current government in Taiwan.
I don't think they're going to.
They have far less offensive and equally as effective ways of doing that.
But let's say they did.
Wouldn't it be crazy for the United States military to deploy troops and equipment and planes and jets and missiles and ships to Taiwan?
Well, unless Korea or the Philippines or somebody like that was willing to forward base or, you know, we would get slaughtered.
You know, China would be fighting on interior lines with equipment that would outnumber us.
And if we tried to land troops anywhere, we would be badly outnumbered.
You know, how many tens or thousands of dead American soldiers do you want to you really want to see?
I mean, these people are scary.
It's not the case that China is threatening us.
If somebody should drill a hole in their heads and put that message inside there, because China is not threatening us.
And that's the reality of it.
And yet we're talking as if we're willing to go to World War III over Taiwan, which we have indeed legally conceded back under Nixon, I guess it was, that Taiwan is legally part of China.
I mean, this is the public policy of the United States.
I know conservative Republicans at the time I was one, before I was a libertarian, opposed it at the time.
I think it was Carter, but it was that time period in the 70s.
And it has been the public policy, the public law of the United States, that there is one China and Taiwan is a part of China.
But do people in the Defense Department actually think that China is going to attack us?
Or is this just a charade by people like Hegseth?
Well, yeah, we're going one step beyond now to say, what did these people actually believe?
And I'm clueless on that because on the rare occasions, when I'm going some years ago, when I used to go to the Heritage Foundation or some of the more real conservative think tanks in Washington, I was always astonished by this.
It would constantly come up China.
And where were they pulling this out of?
I had no idea.
What is the government's justification, Phil?
The government's justification for 750, the number is mind-boggling, military installations around the world in 80 different countries.
If I were to ask Pete Hegseth, Pete, why do we have this?
Why are you funding it?
What would his answer be?
Well, that's a good question.
I would like to ask him the same thing.
I mean, quite a lot of them, of course, would be in NATO or otherwise nominally allied countries.
So they're basically fulfilling some kind of liaison function in that NATO and these other allies Are basically military-based allies who need that kind of back and forth.
But quite a lot of them, of course, are in countries in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, South Asia, places like that where we don't have that argument.
And I have, to be perfectly honest, I don't think I've ever heard anything like this articulated to say why we have all these bases which give us, which, in fact, make us incredibly vulnerable.
Let's think about that one.
These small bases with, like many of the ones, even some of the ones like Syria, which you would think are in an area that's quite dangerous, these small bases, as we've discovered a few months back, when one of them was attacked, don't have any defense against air attack.
They don't have any sophisticated defenses at all.
So these people are sitting ducks.
The Ayatollah or somebody in Iran indicated the awareness that Iran intelligence has of the location of 90,000 American troops easily reached and largely unprotected in the Levant, in that area of the Middle East.
I don't even know if Hig Seth or Trump thinks about this.
I doubt that Trump knows how many people we have there.
He ran on the policy of bringing the troops home.
He's obviously not doing that.
But before we get that.
How is the Defense Department going to spend a trillion dollars that they have never, correct me if I'm wrong, ever passed an audit?
Yeah, well, they haven't passed an audit in ever.
The auditors are mandated to audit them every year, but every year they write a report that says basically they weren't provided with enough information, presumably because the information doesn't even exist, that enables them to do an audit.
And the amounts of money that they couldn't even quantify in any way are enormous.
We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.
And then, of course, there are always these supplementary payments where the Congress will vote money for Israel, of course, and Ukraine.
And this sort of money is sort of off the books.
And this goes on and on.
And when we send equipment to Ukraine and Israel and places like that, this equipment, it's not like we're sending the equipment with a receipt on it that they have to pay us.
They're not going to pay us for any of this stuff.
So we give Israel about $4 billion a year in cash.
Are you telling me that the military equipment and other amounts of cash are on top of that?
Some of it is indeed debited against that $4 billion, which is guaranteed to Israel every year.
But quite a lot of it, like all this, there's something like I've been hearing that there are two or three planes, transport planes, going from the United States to Israel to resupply them every day.
I don't know how true that is, but think of how much materiel that is and how much the cost of the flights are.
And you add all this up, you total it up.
And the number that I saw, which I consider reliable, is that we've been well over the trillion dollar mark for a long time.
And this past year, we've spent $1.77 trillion, which is considerably more than a trillion.
And this all goes on to the national debt, of course.
And it's estimated that Trump's current beautiful big bill is going to add $3 trillion to the U.S. debt all by itself.
Can Hag Seth spend a trillion dollars a year?
Well, you know, if he gives it to his wife and she goes shopping somewhere, she might be able to take a bite out of that.
But I don't know.
I mean, there's so much corruption in Washington in so many ways.
There are probably all kinds of ways that these clever guys like Mr. Cruz, Senator Cruz, figure out how to get rid of this money or make it disappear.
I give them no credit for any kind of good feeling towards what they should be doing for the average American citizen, because obviously that's not part of their agenda.
Right, right.
We know that.
How is it that the United States for centuries has condemned colonial wars and yet now engages in them itself just using a different name?
Well, it's a matter of semantics, isn't it?
I mean, because essentially when we pushed the red man out of what today is the United States of America, that was a colonial war.
And then there was a pure colonial war, obviously the Spanish-American War, and that's 150 years ago.
So we've always been into this game when it kind of benefited us to play with linguistics and pretend we're not actually talking about colonial wars in the same way that the British did it and the French did it.
So, and indeed, let's look at the history of the last 50 years, 60 years in the Middle East.
I mean, these are all pure colonial wars.
When we were putting, we and the Brits were putting the Israelis or creating the Israeli state by putting in hundreds of thousands of Jews from out of Europe and then arming them and protecting them against the indigenous population, which was forced to move in large part to Gaza.
You know, these are all colonial wars, and there's no other way to look at it.
Do you think that Mossad has some sort of a stranglehold over Trump?
I think Israel has had a stranglehold over both our political parties and all of our recent presidents.
Now, how this is manifest is kind of it gets tricky.
We're hearing a lot more, especially in the last two years, about how Mossad actually is welcome in the White House.
Mossad officers are welcome in the White House, welcome at CIA.
When I was at CIA, I wasn't up in the top ranks of the director's office, but I would be seriously doubting that Israeli officers would be invited in to the headquarters building.
So, you know, I think this is something that's gone through an evolution.
Israel is in charge.
Netanyahu can come here anytime he wants and come out with ridiculous things to get the U.S. even more involved in his wars.
And he gets away with it.
They get away with everything.
Israel is never held accountable for anything.
And yeah, they run the game.
They run the media.
They run the banks.
You know, where does it end?
I don't know.
Would you put it past Netanyahu to blackmail Trump over the Epstein issue if Mossad has information that would be crippling to his political career, his tenure in office?
I wouldn't even put an if on that.
I would put that they absolutely have incriminating information and that Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence.
There were reports before they decided they don't have any client lists or anything like that about former Israeli prime ministers dropping in at Epstein's mansion in Manhattan.
These reports were confirmed.
Intelligence officers from Israel were visitors.
You know, this is no joke.
This was a well-funded, well-thought-out intelligence operation that was intended to gain control of certain aspects of what the United States government was doing and what it might do.
This has since been expanded to Israel's desire to have the United States as its actual partner when it goes around and kills tens of thousands of people and starts wars.
Watch Trump's defensive reaction at a cabinet meeting when a member of the press asks the Attorney General, not him, but the Attorney General, where are those files that you said a month ago on Fox News were on your desk.
Chris?
Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
This guy's been talked about for years.
That is unbelievable.
Do you want to waste the time?
Do you feel like answering?
I don't mind answering.
I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein.
In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said, I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it's sitting on my desk to be reviewed.
Also, to the tens of thousands of video, never going to be released, never going to see the light of day.
To him being an agent, I have no knowledge about that.
We can get back to you on that.
And that's it on Epstein.
Well, it's obvious he didn't want anybody to go there in a nationally televised press conference.
I have one more question that I want to ask you about.
And that is the cutoff of aid to Ukraine, which Trump says he knew nothing about, which political reports that Hegset did on his own, which Trump ordered countermanded.
Is it even conceivable that the Secretary of Defense would do something like this without the president knowing about it?
Or is this Trump just not wanting to acknowledge his own orders?
Well, it is incomprehensible that the Secretary of Defense would deliberately, shall we say, increase the American role in a war that Trump claims he wants to get out of.
So this is incomprehensible.
The president would not know this.
There's an article that just appeared this afternoon.
I think it was in The Hill, saying that Hegset is in trouble.
So we'll see where this goes.
But this is typical of the Trump administration, where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, where nobody is even capable, apparently, of reading something or comprehending what it means.
And this stuff, you know, Epstein was not running a garage sale or something like that.
He had a sophisticated operation.
There were probably records up the wazoo.
And if those records are no longer in existence, it's because they've been destroyed by people, by orders of people like Donald Trump, who was a frequent visitor at Epstein's place in Florida.
So, you know, here we go again.
I've been asking all of our guests this week a similar question.
Are the neocons triumphant in the Trump second administration?
I'm not so sure it's the same neocons that we have been identifying for all these years since.
Is the neocon mentality triumphant?
Yeah, yeah, that's a better expression.
I think that what The neocons were pushing for in their manifesto, The Clean Break, which came out what 1996, something like that.
Yeah, they basically were looking for U.S. dominance or hegemony in all important sectors of the world, which is maybe why China is on the list.
And they believe that this was the proper role, the rule of law as law is made up by them and by the United States, and that this is what they wanted to develop.
And of course, we have a bunch of people in the Trump administration that believe in that same sort of thing very clearly.
Bill Giraldi, thank you very much.
A pleasure, my dear friend.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Thanks for these great pieces, America's Trillion Dollar, quote, defense, close, quote, budget.
Everybody should read it.
All the best, my friend.
We'll see you again next week.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
And coming up tomorrow, Thursday, Pepe Escobar, if we can find him, Chris will probably find him.
▲
Export Selection